Moving to Microservices at SoundCloud with Lukasz Plotnicki

“You can have a monolith, and it can be a perfectly good thing.”

Monoliths versus microservices – the architectural debate continues across the internet. SoundCloud is a popular music company that experienced the rapid development benefits of a monolith, as well as the long-term technical debt. That technical debt has since been relieved by a move towards microservices. In this episode of Software Engineering Daily, Lukasz joins Jeff to talk about the realities of moving from a monolith to a microservices architecture, and walks through the lessons learned at SoundCloud.

Lukasz Plotnicki is a consultant and software engineer at ThoughtWorks, which helps clients address their software development challenges and needs.

Questions

What are the application requirements of SoundCloud?

Is there something about Rails that lends towards apps becoming monolithic?

How did SoundCloud gradually ease into using microservice architecture?

How did the variety of front-end interfaces affect SoundCloud’s monolithic architecture?

What is the difference between a BFF and a microservice?

What are the downsides of a BFF implementation?

What are the lessons the SoundCloud case study has taught you about software architecture?